Community in the Hyphen

Before I went to rabbinical school, I worked at a synagogue in the Houston suburbs for a couple of years. While I was working there, the teacher of the comparative religions class at the local community college called, asking if someone from the synagogue could come to his class to talk about Judaism. The rabbi asked if I wanted to do it. At the start of the class, the professor introduced me by saying, "This is David Katz, he works at our local synagogue, and he's here to talk about his faith." I had walked in with an outline of the topics I wanted to cover during my session, but I had been vacillating between a few different potential starting points. Once the teacher introduced me that way, I realized that he'd given me the introduction that I'd been looking for.

"I'd like to start by correcting what was just said," I said. "Judaism isn't my faith. Faith is the wrong term for Judaism." I went on to say something along the lines of: "Judaism is my profession, and it's truly the core of who I am, but Judaism is not defined by whether or not you believe in one or more specific things. The easiest way I can categorize Judaism is as a way of life, as a way of seeing and being in the world. What it's definitely not, is a faith." Everything else I had to say flowed from that point.

So often today, we're asked to categorize ourselves. We're frequently asked to identify our religion and ethnicity on all kinds of forms and surveys. Usually, "Jewish" ends up as a choice on a list of "religions," or sometimes, "faith traditions." It's just about always listed as an option on a list that usually includes Christian and Muslim, that sometimes includes Buddhist, Hindu, and more forms of Christianity, and occasionally includes other world religions and maybe even "atheist" and/or "non-believer." It's rarely listed as an ethnicity — "Ashkenazic Jew of Eastern European descent" or "Sephardic Jew with North African ancestors" are not usually options on demographic drop-down menus. Realistically, we might understand that that level of detail is usually too involved for something like a school registration or voter ID form. But also rarely seen is the catchall phrase that I think is most appropriate for us to use: "Jewish hyphen American." That's something you pretty much never see, on any set of demographic choices, but I think it's the best way to explain who we truly are.

Usually when you see an identity listed as "something hyphen American," it's either a nationality, like Italian-American, or an ethnicity, like African-American. Jews aren't listed with either of those, because neither accurately describes who we are. "Jewish" of course isn't a country, and very few if any of us here today were born in the only officially Jewish country on the planet - and, if we were, that would make us Israeli-Americans, not Jewish-Americans. Ethnicity might seem like a more accurate way to describe us, but there's a clear issue with that definition: while you can't choose to become ethnically Hispanic or Black, you can choose to become Jewish. It would seem like that's not the correct drop-down menu for us, either. So, who, or what, are we? I'd like to suggest that "Jewish-American," with the hyphen between the two words being an important part of this moniker, is the best way to describe who just about all of us here this morning are - in a way that's different from most if not all other hyphenated American identities, and that is also fairly unique to us as a group.

I know that what I shared with you on Rosh Hashanah morning really landed for some of you - several people have reached out to talk about it. And as I've thought this week about why it was so impactful for so many of you, what strikes me most isn't only the message itself, useful as I hope it was. It's that Judaism was the thing that gave us the language of that talk's message - a way of thinking about how to relate to one another that is honest, realistic, multivalent, and potentially merciful. That fact isn't a coincidence, and it's not unique to that one teaching. When I'm struggling to understand something - when I'm lost, or confused, or trying to make sense of a hard question - I look to Judaism. I just about always have. Throughout my life, over and over again, Jewish text and thought have turned out to offer the most effective and precise tools I have for making sense of the ordinary and complicated business of being a human being.

This morning, I'd like to apply those Jewish tools to the question of our identity - to better understanding who we are as "Jewish-Americans." What does being "Jewish hyphen Americans" actually mean, and what does it have to do with today's very specific work of Teshuvah - with atoning for the things we've done wrong this past year, and with setting a course to be better versions of ourselves in the year ahead? I don't think you can do that work, on Yom Kippur or on any other day, if you don't first know who's doing it. So on this Yom Kippur morning, let's talk about who we are.

Jews have always argued about what Judaism is, and about who counts as Jewish. Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, offered a one-sentence definition that has stayed with me since I first heard it, and which is one of the reasons I became a Reconstructionist rabbi: Judaism, he said, is "the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people." I've always loved that definition, and I'm happy to unpack it with anyone who's interested in talking about it. However, I recently read a description of who and what Jews are, which I think is even more useful for understanding the essence of being "Jewish-Americans."

The American Jewish writer Dara Horn, whose essay collection People Love Dead Jews came out a few years ago, has become one of our foremost commentators on Jewish identity and the American Jewish experience. At the beginning of September, she published a new book that's called The Final Solution to the Jewish Question: A Love Story for the Living (I'll be leading a discussion of it with the TBE book club in early 2027, so consider this a bit of a preview). In it, she says: "Jews are members of a kind of group that was common in the ancient Near East, but is rare in the West today - a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a non-universalizing religion is but one feature."

I'm going to say that again, slowly, because every word in that is important. "Jews are members of a kind of group that was common in the ancient Near East but is rare in the West today, a joinable tribal group with a shared history, homeland, and culture, of which a non-universalizing religion is but one feature." A "tribal group" - not a religion first, but a people, in the ancient sense, bound by descent and history and land, the way the Israelites were a tribal confederation long before "Judaism" was a word anyone used. A group with a "shared history" and "a shared homeland" - these are things that are real, specific, and geographic, not metaphorical. Religion - Jewish religious practice, belief, and ritual - is not the whole of this identity. It's one feature of it. It's important, central even, but it's not the entire structure. Then, there's the word that makes Jewish identity almost unique among ancient tribal groups: "joinable." You can't join the Cherokee Nation by choice, or become ethnically Japanese through conversion. But you can become Jewish - fully and completely, with no asterisk - through the process of conversion, and be welcomed as a member of this tribe in every sense that matters. That combination - an ancient tribal peoplehood that is nonetheless open to newcomers - is, as Horn notes, genuinely rare.

I share all of this with you not as a history lesson, but because I believe it bears directly on why we're gathered in this room today. As I said earlier, you can't do the work of teshuvah, at any time of the year, if you don't first know who is doing the work. And most of us, if we're honest, have never been given language this precise for who, exactly, that is. Who, exactly, we are. We are a tribal, joinable peoplehood, that lives inside of, and is woven through, a particular national identity. We are also a peoplehood whose members are required to annually do teshuvah.

Being Jewish-American, being part of this peoplehood, is a particularly unique identity, one that's different from being Israeli and Jewish, French and Jewish, or Brazilian and Jewish. It's an identity that combines and celebrates practices and values that are important parts of both Jewish life and American life, while also wrestling with how the two co-exist. It's an identity that also requires learning to live with the tension that comes from that specific and unusual coexistence. It's an identity that combines the culture, history, and values, as well as the unique religious practices, of that shared tribal peoplehood, together with the culture, history, and values of what may be the most culturally dominant country that this planet has ever seen. How all of that does and doesn't fit together is the story of our lives - and it's what makes living with that hyphen between Jewish and American such a unique thing.

I wish I could tell you that this combination resolves neatly - that once you understand what we are, the tension disappears. It doesn't. A part of me wonders whether this tension is simply another room in the heart I spoke about last week - but I don't think that's quite right, either. A room, at least, is a place where something can rest. This tension, the lived experience of the hyphen between Jewish and American, doesn't rest. It just keeps asking to be lived.

Being Jewish-American means being raised to prioritize both sets of values at once - American ideals like democracy, equality, and freedom, and Jewish ideals like supporting the poor and the marginalized, fighting against tyranny, and, being a part of a community - usually without spending much time sorting out which value came from where. And if I'm honest, if I actually try to sort out which is which in a given moment - which part of me is speaking, and where that's coming from - it's harder than I expect it to be.

Some of it is easy enough. Sometimes we're just plain Jews - people whose Sabbath is on Friday night and Saturday, who celebrate holidays on a schedule that follows our own unique calendar that's different from everyone else's, who pray to one God in a language that's thousands of years old. Sometimes we're just plain Americans - people who sing the Star Spangled Banner before sporting events, who vote because it's our civic responsibility and not a religious obligation, who measure a year as much by the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving as by any other calendar. People whose first language, whose gut instincts about equality and individual rights, were shaped by growing up in this country.

And sometimes who we are is not just Jewish, and not just American, but the unique, hyphenated combination of these two identities. Sometimes we're Americans who have to decide whether or not to take off from work or school on Yom Kippur, who have to choose between participating in the community event that's taking place on a Friday night and going to services, and who have to decide whether or not we want to keep Kosher, and if so, to what degree - do we want to be the rare New Yorkers who don't add bacon to their morning bodega egg and cheese sandwiches, or the people who skip over three quarters of the menu in most seafood restaurants? Sometimes we're Jews who have to decide things like if our kids are going to skip their weekend sporting events so they can go to their cousin's Bat Mitzvah, if we can take a great job in a place without a Jewish community, and who have to decide what kind of relationship we have to the only country in the world where our people are the majority - even if we've never been there.

Let's be honest: none of these are easy decisions. There isn't a clean formula that tells you when to lean Jewish and when to lean American, or how to weigh a ballgame against a simcha or a performance against a chag. There's nothing about this struggle in the Torah, in the Talmud, or in the medieval codes of Jewish law. What ultimately makes us unique - and what makes us who we are - is all of these practices and behaviors and choices and struggles smashed together, unresolved, into the particularly unique hyphenates that Jewish-Americans are. And if you've ever found that combination difficult to explain, even to yourself - I happen to think that particular struggle is a major part of what it means to be Jewish hyphen American.

Earlier this morning, last night, and a few more times until the end of this sacred day, we'll rise and recite the Ashamnu together. We'll beat our chests and confess, alphabetically, to a list of sins - and we'll do it in the plural. "Ashamnu. Bagadnu. Gazalnu - We have sinned. We have betrayed. We have stolen." When we recite this confessional, we don't say "I've done this" - we say we. I talked about this when we said these prayers last night, and Steve talked about it again before you said those prayers this morning, because I think it's one of the most remarkable things that Jewish congregations do all year. Throughout Yom Kippur services, every one of us will confess to things that we personally did not do. We'll stand next to people whose failures we don't know, saying words that cover all of us, yet single out none of us. There's an anonymity that's built into communally saying the confessional prayers, an anonymity that protects every individual in this room. And there's something else built into it, too: the assumption that we come before God as a community, as a people - or we don't come at all. 

I believe that it's during that oft-repeated moment, on this particular day, when the hyphen stops blending, and struggling to blend, American and Jewish, and where Judaism makes a choice. The American instinct about atonement - and it's a good instinct, a noble one - is that atonement is personal. You examine your own conscience. You take responsibility for your own actions. You make your own amends, for your own failures and nobody else's. American culture prizes the individual, and asks each of us to stand on our own. That's not what Judaism does. Judaism puts in front of you a list of misbehaviors, written in the plural, and asks you to own up to it, out loud, in a room full of other Jews. Not because your individual failures don't matter - they do, enormously, and we spend these ten days focusing on them. But because on this day, in this room, the unit that stands before God is not you. It's us. 

This is where Yom Kippur helps us to understand what it truly means to be Jewish-Americans. Like so much of Jewish practice, you can't do the work of Yom Kippur alone, which means you can't do it at all unless you recognize and understand that you're a part of something larger than yourself. Not as an American who happens to be Jewish, doing private moral accounting in a room that happens to have other people in it - but as an American member of a joinable tribal group with a shared history, standing where members of that group have stood for centuries, saying the same words in the same plural form. That's why knowing who we are is so important on this day, of all days, and it's how this day of all days helps us to better understand ourselves. It's not an intellectual exercise. It's because the liturgy of this day assumes that any person reciting it is embedded in this particular group of people, and it asks that person to do something that an individual, by definition, cannot do alone.

As we move forward into this new year, may we be blessed with a community that holds all of who we are — our Americanness, our Jewishness, and our hyphenness. May we stop waiting and hoping for the tension between them to resolve, and instead learn to live inside that tension openly, honestly, and lovingly. And may we always remember that what lives in the hyphen isn't emptiness, and isn't only tension. It's actually each other. 

Ken yehi ratzon — may this be God's will. And let us say together: Amen.